The workshop is devoted
to
psychologically-motivated computational models of language
acquisition. That
is, models which are compatible with research in
psycholinguistics,
developmental psychology and linguistics.

Workshop History:

This is the sixth
meeting of the
Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition
workshop following
PsychoCompLA-2004, held in Geneva, Switzerland as part of the
20th
International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-
2004),
PsychoCompLA-2005 as part of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the
Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL-2005) held in Ann Arbor,
Michigan where the workshop
shared a joint session with the Ninth Conference on
Computational Natural
Language Learning (CoNLL-2005), PsychoCompLA-2007 held in
Nashville, Tennessee
as part of the 29th meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
(CogSci- 2007), PsychoCompLA-2008 held in Washington D.C., as
part of the 30th meeting of
the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-2008), and
PsychoCompLA-2009 held over
two days before the 31st meeting of the Cognitive Science
Society (CogSci-2009)
in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Workshop Description:

The workshop will
present research and
foster discussion centered around psychologically-motivated
computational
models of language acquisition, with an emphasis on the
acquisition of syntax.
In recent decades there has been a thriving research agenda
that applies
computational learning techniques to emerging natural language
technologies and
many meetings, conferences and workshops in which to present
such research.
However, there have been only a few (but growing number of)
venues in which psychocomputational
models of how humans acquire their native language(s) are the
primary focus.
Psychocomputational models of language acquisition are of
particular interest
in light of recent results in developmental psychology that
suggest that very
young infants are adept at detecting statistical patterns in
an audible input
stream. However, how children might plausibly apply
statistical 'machinery' to
the task of grammar acquisition, with or without an innate
language component,
remains an open and important question. One effective line of
investigation is
to computationally model the acquisition process and determine
interrelationships between a model and linguistic or
psycholinguistic theory,
and/or correlations between a model's performance and data
from linguistic
environments that children are exposed to.

Topics
and Goals:

Given the collocation of the
workshop with the Input
and Syntactic Acquisition workshop, submissions
that present research related to the acquisition of syntax are
strongly encouraged,
though submissions on the computational modelling on any
aspect of human
language acquisition are welcome.

Specifically, submissions on
(but not necessarily
limited to) the following topics are welcome:

·Empirical models that make use
of child-directed
corpora such as CHILDES.

This workshop intends to bring
together researchers
from cognitive psychology, computational linguistics,
other
computer/mathematical sciences, linguistics and
psycholinguistics working on
all areas of language acquisition. Diversity and
cross-fertilization of ideas
is the central goal.